by Kate Quinn
“Now, I really won’t allow this,” Anneliese scolded. “Let’s set a date, Jordan. The date your new life begins; the day you go and start leading it. I don’t want to let anything stand in your way.”
“My way or your way?” Jordan smiled, joking. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get rid of me!”
Anneliese’s smile slipped for just a fraction of a second, showing a different expression, and in Jordan’s lap, her camera finger twitched. Click.
“Well,” Anneliese said quietly, “I certainly didn’t mean it like that.”
“Anna, I’m sorry.” Reaching out to touch her stepmother’s hand. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out, not at all.”
“Of course.” Anneliese rose, took the glasses back to the kitchen. “Would you like more iced tea?”
“Yes.” Jordan tried a smile. “Maybe we should look at apartment listings together. You really didn’t have to do that for me when you were in New York.”
Anneliese gave her usual warm smile over one shoulder. “It was my pleasure.”
Especially if you really do want me out as soon as possible, the thought came.
But Jordan shoved that out of her head, because Anneliese was sitting down again looking entirely her friendly self, asking, “Your last photograph for the essay, what will it be?”
Jordan wasn’t sure yet—Ruth at her violin, small fingers on the strings, the fierce line between her brows as she played with exquisite care through that simple Russian lullaby? But Jordan couldn’t say that to Anneliese, so she said something about going to the nearest station to snap firemen at work, and Anneliese teased that perhaps it was a handsome fireman who’d been putting the roses in her cheeks. And even as Jordan teased back, another thought couldn’t help but rise through her mind like the shadowy image of a print rising through the shimmer of developer fluid: When exactly had she started keeping so many secrets from Anneliese?
SHE MIGHT HAVE forgotten all about it, but four days later Jordan walked into the shop to find Anneliese and Mr. Kolb shouting at each other in German.
Or rather, Kolb was shouting—shambling back and forth, spitting German and brandy fumes. Completely soused, Jordan thought, recoiling from the anger on that usually affable face. Anneliese stood small and composed before him, answering in German that sliced the air. Both lapsed into silence at the sound of the bell, staring at Jordan standing there in the yellow summer dress her stepmother had whipped together in her sewing room.
“Jordan,” Anneliese said at last, switching back to English. “I didn’t expect you.”
Jordan had dropped in to see Tony, but he was clearly on lunch break. She crossed to her stepmother’s side, looking at Mr. Kolb. “Do we have a problem?”
He didn’t look at Jordan, still staring at Anneliese. “Making you good money, good work—”
“You cannot come to work intoxicated, no matter how much good work you have done for me,” Anneliese said icily. “Go home. Dry out. Keep calm.”
He said something else slushy and spiteful in German, and Anneliese cut him off with a rattling retort, eyes blazing. His mouth snapped shut, he looked at the ground. When he glanced back up, his shoulders had slumped.
“Get your coat,” said Anneliese.
“I’ll get it,” Jordan said. She didn’t want him lurching drunkenly through the back room with so many fragile things waiting to be knocked over. She found Kolb’s coat hanging over the back chair, wrinkling her nose at the clink of what sounded like a bottle in the pocket, and turned around to find him right behind her, swaying. She jumped.
“So much money,” he said. “That bitch—”
Jordan recoiled. “Do not speak about Mrs. McBride like—”
He cut her off, spitting more insults. Hure, Scheissekopf, Jägerin, swaying on his feet. He hardly seemed to know she was there.
Anneliese’s voice snapped like a whip behind them. “Herr Kolb.”
He flinched, and Jordan’s tongue shriveled. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a man look more afraid.
“I won’t have you frightening my stepdaughter,” Anneliese went on, evenly. “Go home.”
Kolb snatched his coat and stumbled out. Anneliese opened the door for him, then shut it again. The shop bell rang tinnily in the sudden silence.
“Fire him,” Jordan said, finding her tongue again.
“I can’t afford to fire him.” An acrid little smile. “He has made us a great deal of money, Jordan; he was quite correct about that. He’s very good at his job.”
“We can find someone else. Dad would never put up with that kind of talk.”
“He wouldn’t dare talk to your father that way. It is what it is, a woman owning a business.” Anneliese shrugged. “Tomorrow he’ll slink back apologizing. Drunks always do.”
“That doesn’t excuse what he called you.” Hure; Jordan was fairly sure what that meant. Scheissekopf, Jägerin; she didn’t know. “Bitch,” well, that certainly didn’t need any translation.
“Believe me, I take no pleasure in being insulted by clerks.” Anneliese sighed. “For now, he’s harmless.”
“Are you sure?”
That curling smile returned. “I’m not afraid of a man like Herr Kolb.”
No, Jordan thought. He’s the one terrified of you. She’d seen his face, close enough to reach out and touch the beads of sweat.
Anneliese picked up her gloves. “Let’s go home, shall we?”
SOMETHING WAS TUGGING at Jordan, like a pin stuck into the back of her mind. Something she couldn’t quite get a grip on. Something Kolb said, something her dad had said . . . ? She barely ate any of Anneliese’s excellent meatloaf that night, too perplexed by that niggle of a thought that refused to come out.
“You should go out,” Anneliese told her. “Have your young man take you somewhere!”
The words echoed, all in Anneliese’s voice.
You should go out.
He’ll go when we can afford it.
The date your new life begins . . . go and start leading it!
Go.
But that was ridiculous. Anneliese wasn’t trying to get rid of her, for God’s sake.
Something else still niggled, even as Jordan looked into her stepmother’s candid blue eyes. Making the excuse of film to develop, she took herself down to the darkroom, where she could smell the faint hint of Tony’s aftershave. She wished he were here. He had a way of being able to find the question that somehow hooked the right answer from the mind’s murk.
Slowly, Jordan flipped through her photo-essay. The airfield mechanic, the dancer. What am I looking for? The baker, the pilot. What? All the way back to the first: Dan McBride, his hands framing the card salver. Just the sliver of his eye, wise and amused.
It dropped into her head with a long, protracted click, like a heavy door creaking open ever so slowly, letting in the light a ray at a time.
Anything ever strike you about Kolb, missy?
Like what?
I don’t know. He always looks furtive anytime I come in to check on the restoration work. And with his English so patchy, I can’t ask him anything but the simplest questions. Of course Anna translates anything tricky.
Jordan’s father, the day he’d given her the pearl earrings for her coming wedding. The wedding that never happened.
Does he bring people into the shop? Not customers, I mean bringing people into the back.
Not that I’ve noticed, Jordan remembered answering. Why?
I came up here one day and Kolb had another German fellow in the back room . . . Kolb went off in a babble.
He has experts in sometimes. Jordan remembered saying that too. Anna gave him permission.
That’s what she said.
Jordan stood there, looking at the photograph of her father. She hadn’t given that conversation a second thought, the day they had it. She’d been distracted by her upcoming wedding, rushing at her like a train. Her dad hadn’t sounded worried, no note of alarm in hi
s voice.
But if he was worried, would he have let you know it? The question answered itself, coolly. No, he’d have told himself you shouldn’t worry your head about it.
And was it suspicious, really? Anneliese translating for Kolb, letting him bring in people to help in restoring badly worn books or chipped end tables?
Kolb today, angry. Making you good money, good work. So much money. That bitch—
“He has made money for us,” Jordan said aloud. “Perfectly legally.” Business had blossomed with Kolb to take over restoration work. Anneliese had been the one who suggested sponsoring him, her voice affectionate as she described his old shop in Salzburg, where he’d given her peppermints just as he now gave them to Ruth.
So why did he look so frightened when Anneliese told him to dry out and keep calm?
He had a bad war, Anneliese would say. A bad war could make a man flinching and fearful of anyone. Perfectly plausible.
Except that Jordan didn’t quite believe it.
LOOKING AT THE CHECKBOOK the following day steadied Jordan’s nerves. She’d always kept the family accounts; she knew to the dime what was in the bank. The neatly ruled lines showed no money that shouldn’t have been there. A healthy balance, certainly, showing the kind of steady increase that any prospering business could be proud of. Nothing suspicious. But somehow the spike of relief wore off, and without quite examining her own thoughts, Jordan found herself reaching for her hat and pocketbook, and taking herself to the bank where her father had done business all his life.
“Jordan McBride!” the clerk exclaimed. A grandmotherly sort with ice-cream puffs of hair; Jordan had carefully waited until her line was free. Far better to try this with Miss Fenton, who had watched Jordan come in with her father since she was knee-high, than one of the new clerks who got stuffy about answering a girl’s questions if she didn’t have her father along. Jordan spent some minutes chatting across the desk—Is your niece really six already, Miss Fenton? Isn’t she precious!—then trotted out a careful story about forgetting to note a deposit in the checkbook at home; had there been any large deposits made lately . . . Not in checking or savings accounts? What a relief. “I know Dad’s gone, but I just wince thinking of him looking down at me and thinking I’ve been careless,” Jordan said ruefully.
“God rest his soul, they broke the mold when they made Dan McBride.”
“They certainly did . . . My stepmother’s account, does that show any new deposits? Maybe that’s the one I was thinking of.” Jordan held her breath. Because Anneliese didn’t have an account of her own. Jordan’s father had given her housekeeping money whenever she liked, but the accounts had always been his alone.
“That account has been cashed out, dear.”
“Oh,” Jordan managed to say. “When?”
Miss Fenton squinted. “About a month ago.”
Right before Anneliese had left for New York and Concord. “How much?” Jordan asked, holding her casual tone. It wasn’t the kind of question a clerk should answer, not when her name wasn’t on the account, but Miss Fenton never hesitated. She gave the number right away, and it was a number that made Jordan swallow. No fortune, perhaps, but a nest egg indeed.
“Mrs. McBride said it was an extra insurance policy of your father’s,” Miss Fenton twittered, oblivious. “Such a lovely woman, your stepmother! I’ve always wished I knew her better.”
Mrs. Dunne had said the same thing once, when Jordan was dropping off Ruth to play. I’m happy to help your stepmother! She should come to my sewing circle, all my friends would love to know her better . . . Anneliese had been part of this neighborhood for years, yet how many people knew her well?
I do, Jordan couldn’t help thinking. The woman who had kept agonized vigil at Dan McBride’s hospital bed and had confessed her rusalka nightmare over nighttime cocoa. The woman who had put untold hours into sewing Jordan new skirts and sundresses and could laugh herself sick watching Taro run after a ball. The woman who had offered Jordan a cigarette and independence, affection and freedom. I know her, Jordan thought helplessly. I know her and I love her.
And yet. The fear on Kolb’s face. This money, which perfectly well could be an additional insurance policy—except that Jordan didn’t believe it.
And she wasn’t really surprised later, after she said her good-byes to Miss Fenton and went home, checked the house to be sure Anneliese really was out doing the shopping, and put a call through to the country inn in Concord where her father had taken Anneliese for their honeymoon. The inn where Anneliese had stayed, in conjunction with her New York buying trip. “No Mrs. McBride has stayed here this past month, miss.” Jordan described her carefully—dark hair, blue eyes, in her early thirties, very chic and pretty. “No one like that, miss.”
It took longer, digging into her father’s tooled-leather address book, to find telephone numbers for his colleagues in New York. Other shop owners, antiques dealers, bookbinders; men who had come to Dan McBride’s funeral, with whom he dickered and talked shop at auctions like the ones Anneliese had just attended. Except that none of his colleagues, at least the ones Jordan could get on the telephone, remembered seeing her there. “I’d have noticed her,” the co-owner of Chadwick & Black said, sounding mellow from what Jordan suspected was a two-martini lunch. “Your stepmother’s quite a looker. Your father was a lucky man, God rest his soul.”
“God rest his soul,” Jordan echoed, replacing the receiver. So, Anneliese had not been in Concord or New York.
What did you do, Anneliese? Where did you go? What are you planning? Jordan shook her head in reflexive refusal, but she couldn’t help it: the resurrection of every suspicion she’d ever harbored about Anneliese from the day she’d turned around from the kitchen sink with a soapy plate in her hand, asking Jordan’s father You hunt? as the Leica’s shutter snapped. Mysteries about names, dates, swastikas among roses.
Now, now, Jordan could almost hear her dad chiding. No more of your wild stories, missy! But he was dead, and there was nothing wild or imaginary about the fact that Anneliese had been lying about her recent travels, that there was something fishy between her and Kolb, and that she had a great deal of unexplained cash.
Swastikas. Jordan forced herself to think about them again. And all the rest.
What did you do, Anneliese?
Who are you, Anneliese?
Who?
Chapter 46
Ian
September 1950
Florida coast
Kolb was sent home from work drunk yesterday, according to Jordan,” Tony said over a crackling line. “I think he might be about to crack.”
“Good.” Ian rested an elbow against the door of the telephone box, looking across the street where Nina was disappearing into a beachside five-and-dime. The sun was falling fast. “Because our Florida lead was a fifty-two-year-old man who might have been a camp clerk or a Nazi Party functionary but was definitely not Lorelei Vogt.” Tony swore, but Ian was fatalistic. “They were leads; we had to run them out.”
He and Nina had bitten the bullet and taken a bus down to the tiny town outside Cocoa Beach, Florida, that was their final lead, since bus tickets proved marginally cheaper and quicker than driving the rackety Ford, but the suspicion had already been growing in Ian that with six addresses already scratched off the list, the last name would be no more fruitful. “Who knows, maybe I’ll be back through here someday to help arrest that middle-aged fellow with the Berlin vowels and the nervous look who opened his door to us an hour ago,” he said when his partner ran out of curses.
A pause on the other end, and then Tony’s voice, more thoughtful. “Do you ever want to do more with the center than focus on arrests, boss?”
“Like what?”
“Making a repository. A museum, even, or maybe that isn’t the right word. I don’t know, but I’ve got ideas.”
“Did Jordan McBride put them there?” Ian asked wryly.
“She makes me think. Makes me think a lot, actually
.” Tony took a breath. “What if we brought her into the chase?”
“What?”
“We have nothing to hide; we aren’t doing anything shameful. She might even be able to help. She knows Kolb and the shop, after all. She might have some angle we don’t know.”
“Or maybe she’d fire you for lying to her, and there goes our access to Kolb’s workplace,” Ian pointed out.
Tony’s voice was taut. “I hate lying to her.”
“We’ll talk about it.” Ian ruffled a hand through his hair. “First item for discussion when Nina and I get back tomorrow.” This Florida town was such a hamlet, there wouldn’t be another bus until the morning.
Ian rang off as Nina came strolling out of the five-and-dime with a small package. The sun was down, night falling fast. “I suppose we should try to find a hotel, if they even have hotels.” There wasn’t much to this tiny hamlet except sticky heat and the sound of waves.
“Why bother with hotel?” Nina looked at the darkening sky. “Is nice night.”
For any other woman, Ian thought, that would have meant there was a lovely sunset and a full moon, a night for romance. For Nina, it meant no clouds and only a sliver of moon—in other words, perfect weather to blow things up. “You want to pitch out on the sand all night?”
“Would save money, and we don’t sleep anyway after a hunt. Too fizzed.”
“True enough.” Ian didn’t know if there were two insomniacs alive worse than Nina and himself. On the road, economy dictated sharing a room, and Ian was surprised how much better sleeplessness was when shared. He’d wake at one in the morning with a parachute dream, steady his racheting heart by turning on the light and reading (surreptitiously) one of his wife’s Georgette Heyer paperbacks balanced on Nina’s bare shoulder as she slumbered. Eventually he curled up around her and dropped back to sleep, vaguely feeling her come awake an hour later and prowl out of bed to sit at the hotel window and drink in the night air. When she came back, she slid under the covers and started nipping his ear—“I’m not sleepy, luchik, tire me out”—and after he’d obliged her, they both usually managed to drowse past dawn, legs entangled, Nina’s arm thrown across Ian’s ribs, his face buried in her hair.